What is my research question?
This is one of the headings I put into my note book last week with the intention of making sure I don’t forget that I need to start thinking in these terms. I feel like it is something that should be obvious. My research question is my research. It’s simple. When I work what is the answer I’m looking for? What is my drive, my focus?
The problem I’m finding now is that when I try to address the question of the ‘Question’ I find it isn’t something that necessarily falls on to the page in a coherent, organised sentence. Can my question be a feeling, an inkling, a vague notion? Well, no. Understanding and being able to articulate what my work is about is vital. In my application to do this course I wrote what I believed my work was about. My work existed at that time in a certain way. I looked at how I worked, what I think about when experimenting, I looked at what came out of that thinking and what emerged through the doing. That felt easier and a more natural way to comment on the goings on of my practice at the time.
However, since I started this course, things have changed, the waters muddied. I now am trying to look through the murky depths of my ideas, to find some certainty and some clarity, at least enough to feel a movement forward, a sustained momentum. The answer to finding this is the ‘Question’.
Ok, so what I want to do now is stop at this point and consider what is important to me, discovering this by honestly looking at what I have been doing and what I come back to, time and time again. The following 3 points are my attempt to search out some clarity and some common threads linking my ideas together.
1.How we see, feel and respond to images of spaces that indicate ‘non-places’ (those everyday places that exist purely to take us somewhere else). Using line and perspective drawing as an indicator of these places, juxtaposing lines in space with lines creating space.
2.Lefebvre’s theories on the production of social space. The factors involved in how space has been organised and developed and what this contributes to in terms of our experience and reading of our everyday environment in Western society.
3.Looking at the function of the gallery space, comparing its physical material existence and boundaries, with the cultural, social understanding as something designed to provoke ideas and discussion through the viewers reading of art pieces within its context. (exploring the notion that through its separation from the reality of the everyday, it presents ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ of this reality).
Reading this back I’m not sure if I’m articulating myself very well but it really is as precise as I can be right now. I tend to keep trying to elaborate more and more until things turn into a mangle of random thoughts so I’ll settle for these 3 points for now and come back to them again soon to see if I can refine and write with more clarity. It really does feel like trying to find something that is determined to remain obscure.
